In recent years, vehicle drive supporting systems that include a camera mounted on the motor vehicle have been proposed. In many of these systems, a camera is used to collect forward data in a vehicle running direction, e.g., forward direction, to provide information for safety to the driver and/or to facilitate automatically performing a vehicle control operation or the like. For example, thermal imaging night vision cameras can be attached to the front end of motor vehicles for assisting drivers in detecting pedestrians and/or animals.
Such cameras typically include a protective outer window that forms part of a sealed enclosure assembly system. A non-limiting example of a camera and a protective outer window that forms part of a sealed enclosure for the camera is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,329,869, filed Sep. 13, 2005, which is commonly owned by the assignee of the present application and is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety for all purposes. Generally, a protective outer window is secured to a sealed enclosure using some form of threaded fastening arrangement (e.g. threaded fasteners, twist-on, or the like). Moreover, typically the sealed enclosure assembly system together with the camera is attached to the motor vehicle using an additional threaded fastening arrangement. There is a need to improve such attachment means so that the various attachments associated with the camera arrangement are relatively quick, simple and inexpensive, preferably without requiring any special tools to facilitate assembly of the camera arrangement and/or attachment of the camera arrangement to the motor vehicle.